Lady and Pups

Overnight Taco Meat and Dripping Tortilla Non-recipe

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This is an easy, and my first “non-recipe” that I’m leaving you with before heading off to Scotland on a hubby-forced whiskey tour.

What’s a non-recipe you ask. Well, to my understanding, it means it’s a general guideline of techniques that one can use to adapt to a variety of ingredients. In fact, I wasn’t really planning on publishing this as a post, as I was simply putting a random dinner together and mid-way through, thought that this is actually a great way of anxiety-free entertaining so why not share it.

So essentially, blah blah blah, what I’m talking about is this. You take a big hunk of fatty cut of meat, in this case, beef short ribs, but it could be pork belly, whole duck, ox tongue or whatever available in other marvelous circumstances. Then you leave this hunk of meat alone in its marinate for a good 12 hours, in this case, a red wine concoction, but it could be whatever bath of flavors that you could humanly imagine. Then the night before you serve, you wrap it in foil and throw it in utter abandonment inside a low-heat oven and then, you go to sleep. The next morning, it is removed from the oven and left in neglect in room-temperature until two hours before your serve this baby, you take its insanely aromatic fat from the dripping to make a stack of beautiful flour tortilla before you return the meat back into a blazing oven, just briefly, until the exterior of the roast is gloriously caramelized and the interior is warmed through. Chop chop chop with a big scissor and toss loosely and triflingly with mustard and pickled peppercorns, then salsa, hot sauce, nadi-nadi-nah, you know the drill.

I don’t feel like I need to explain to you what happens when a well-marinated fatty protein gets broken down low and slow inside its own rendered fat and dripping, and that liquid roast really, is recycled into the carbohydrate that’s going to be used to wrap the protein as a vehicle into your mouth. I don’t. I really don’t.

So as a token of gratitude, please leave in the comments of places where a pissed wife stuck with a drunk husband can go for a good haggis in Edinburgh.

June 25, 2019

In All recipes, Meat

Roast pork butt sandwich

A couple weeks ago, I wondered my way into a small break from cooking. For no particular reason than because, over one morning coffee, I felt it was called for. People talk about the ferocity of love and passion a lot, in all forms and sizes that drives humanity for what it’s worth, rising in salute for its consuming, inconvenient, majestic torment and glory. But what fuels it, what fuels love and passion, is often less marketable.

At certain points, what fuels passion is simply absence.

THE AU JUS… AND THE THOROUGHNESS OF ITS RAMPAGE DOWN THE RECEPTIVE PORES OF A TOASTED ITALIAN ROLL, DETERMINES WHETHER THIS IS A SANDWICH WITH PORK, OR,
A ROAST PORK SANDWICH

So I took a break, cruising. I didn’t think about cooking other than making basic sustenances. I rubbed my dogs‘ heads a lot. I binge-watched two Netflix original series eating junk foods. I rekindled with the familiar joy of ordering take-outs. Holding a brown bag of meal No. 2 and a large diet coke, I waited, on the curb, for the lights to turn.

And just like that, I bumped into Fedoroff’s.

To be exact, Philadelphia-style roast pork sandwich shop in Brooklyn. And by “bumped into”, I really just meant, like everything else nowadays, that I saw it on Instagram.

It spoke to me. I took one look at this monstrous, ageless battle of meat VS bun, and I felt the jolt of adrenaline seeping back into my veins. I wanted to cook this sandwich.

For the record, once again, I have not had a Philadelphia roast pork sandwich in my entire life. Hence, this recipe is not based on any single one of your particularly preferred joint, especially not Fedoroff’s. In fact, I’m dead certain that my approach to this beloved classic is as offensive to its disciples as inserting hot dogs onto a margarita pizza. No one intact trunk of meat to marvel over!? No searing before roasting!? Oh sweet mother of Jesus, ginger? Fish sauce!?

Why? First of all, it just makes more sense. To come to this conclusion, you have to be willing to let go of a few fairy tales about roasting. No 1, there’s no such thing as “locking in the juice”. Meats don’t get sealed. They’re not sexual scandals. Legitimately, they can get seared/caramelized/browned for more complex flavors, but if you think that’s going to stop their juice from leaving the mothership in the oven (the antidote to that would be super low temperature but that’s not the story today), I’m afraid this is the adult’s equivalent of realizing there’s no Santa claus. Besides, why make the futile effort to “seal”, when au jus, or aka, drippings is exactly what we are gunning for?

December 11, 2017

In All recipes, Christmas Morning Series (overnight roast), Got Nothing But Time, Noodle/Pasta/Rice, Poultry

X’MAS MORNING SERIES: STUFFED GOOSE BEAST

Every Who
Down in Who-ville
Liked Christmas goose a lot…

But the Grinch,
Who lived just behind the screen of Who-ville,
Did NOT!

The Grinch hated Christmas goose! The whole goose without season!
Now, please ask him why. For everyone quite guesses the reason.
It could be that the work looked a bit like fright.
It could be, perhaps, that his shoes were too tight.
But I think that the most likely reason of all
May have been that his ego was two sizes too small.